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“The larkspur represents the strong bond of love. In general, it signifies an open heart, ardent attachment to someone and the celebration of positivity.”
Aubrey hates the taste of alcohol.
She and Hero have had multiple debates over whether any kind is good at all- bouncing back and forth between different types and shuffling through the internet on Hero’s phone at four in the morning for types that haven’t yet passed their ears enough to be rendered common to them.
It takes a couple of tries before he starts talking. “Never drink the shitty beer at parties, Aubrey,” he tells her, disgust on his face and a quirk of his brow that she’s scarcely noticed until now. “It’ll either drug you or you’re gonna end up blackout drunk after three cups.”
Aubrey chortles, then, because “You grew enough of a spine to go to fucking college parties?” And he has the decency to look at the very least a little bit offended with a pointed glare directed at her. (They both know it has no weight. His glares never have had any.)
She’s gotten curious, a couple of times. Because the padlock on the wine cabinet is loose and she’s figured out that she can twist it to the left, jostle it around, and then pull out bottles of plum liquid and sickly vermillion from inside of it. She starts to think that maybe her drunkard of a mother didn’t care whether or not she’d broken into the cabinet.
(Her mother is hardly home anymore. Aubrey can’t say she misses her without the twinkle of a lie in her eyes and her fingers crossed behind her back.)
It tastes cheap and icky and it burns the back of her throat with a blazing fire that reminds her of the times she’s struck a match upon piles of trash in a tire at three in the morning with her rowdy bunch of friends. She’d talked about the taste of it with Hero, who- after reprimanding her for breaking into a wine cabinet -had sighed and told her that alcohol was like cheap ichor.
“None of the blood, but instead a fire inside your mouth.” He’d grunted out, eyeing the door to Kel’s bedroom atop the stairs.
She doesn’t exactly know why she’d broken into his house at night. Part of her thinks it was because Kel had told her his house had good defense systems and she wouldn’t have been able to in the first place- but now she’s here and perched on the arm of his couch like a bird, and talking about alcohol with a guy that apparently only liked the taste of the expensive fine wines from fancy liquor stores.
“Fuckin’ … Culinary kids.” She says when he offhandedly mentions that to her for at least the fifth time.
“You do realize I’m, like, twenty, right?” Hero shoots back, twirling the end of a pen between his fingertips.
Aubrey snorts and flops headfirst onto his lap, sitting right beside her while the television buzzes quietly in the background. “You’re either a fucking wuss of a kid or you’re a boomer. Pick one.”
“I think I’d rather be a fork in a kitchen cabinet, then.” He says back.
“That wasn’t even on the list of options!”
“It is now.”
She chortles again and chokes on her own, quiet laughter. There’s a Lily of The Valley on the shelf beside the television, with two more lilies she can’t name (Basil definitely could) and thousands of books shoved together in neat rows. Hero knows she’s seen it by now.
But neither of them talk about how there’s a memory that plays behind their eyes- where Mari’s smiling and holding a pot full of them and Basil’s telling her how they can mean chastity and sweetness and motherhood and fucking humility in some sort of all-in-one combo package deal.
Basil doesn’t leave as much of a sour taste in her mouth as even the mere mention of his name did before they left the hospital. She can’t exactly place when exactly that had happened.
Aubrey doesn’t talk about that, though. Instead she opens her mouth again and something similar, but not, comes out.
“Hero?” She asks. He looks down at her and his fingers stop spinning the pen around, full attention on his friend sitting in his lap. It’s so, so quiet. Aubrey falters a little. “Do… Do you think. That things will go back to how they used to be?”
Hero’s eyes go soft. Mushy, like the insides of a peach. She never liked peaches, she’d always preferred strawberries and couldn’t for the life of her fathom how Sunny liked anything grape flavored, but that’d been a trait both sol and Mari had shared way back when. She decides now, though, that this type of peach is okay. It’s okay, for now. She’ll let it’s mushy insides sweeten the back of her mouth for a little while longer.
“Honestly?” He murmurs. Aubrey nods and sits up, pushing herself back on her perch with her legs hung over the side of the couch’s arm, now. “No,” Hero says.
“And it probably never will.” She finishes.
Hero nods.
There’s blooming hyacinths in his eyes- blue and bright and sad. They’re so, so sad.
But who isn’t? Her mind tells her. Everyone is sad. There’s hyacinths spilling out of her mouth and out of the insides of his sleeves, and they’re fluttering to the floor with an airy scent of sorrow.
(Basil’s lips move in her mind when the word sorrow hooks itself to the petals of the flower.)
“It really, really never will.”
* * *
“Have you tried breathing exercises to bring yourself down from bouts of anger?” Her therapist asks.
Aubrey shakes her head. “They were suggested to me, I think, but I never actually did them.” She mutters. Part of her wonders how her therapist can even hear her.
“Okay, well, would you be opposed to trying to work something out?” Her therapist is kind, and calm, and Aubrey admires them a little if not only for the pin that reads they/them on their chest. There’s budding chamomile flowers and peonies- Healing , Basil had said -and the office that always smells like honeydew and kindness and strawberries is a place that means safe, to her.
So, Aubrey pauses only to swipe her tongue over her chapped lips, and shakes her head for the upteenth time this session. “I think it might be good if we do.”
They nod, and smile, and there’s chamomile flowers and peonies dancing across their face and spilling out of the sleeves of their burgundy sweater.
* * *
Aubrey visits Mari on an overcast day.
The church is white and pristine and modern, now, and she still doesn’t know how Kel manages to stomach going there anymore. There’s no more of the pretty stained glass windows, no more depictions of flowery goddesses dancing across translucent glass, and she finds herself a little bit upset they redid the entire building.
Mari had loved the pretty long windows with their fluttering rainbow colors. She’d loved laying in the creaking old pews early in the morning and the ivy climbing its way up the side of the building. Aubrey finds that she loved them too, if only for the fact it reminded her of Mari and how the Lily of the Valleys poked out of the hems of her brightly colored shirts.
There’s a bundle of white egret orchids in her hands, and she gazes upon the headstone with dozens of pretty flowers surrounding them with a little bit of sadness. A smile etches its way onto her face when she kneels in front of Mari’s grave, with it’s dainty text and moss growing over the sides.
She notices how despite the moss and ivy clings to the sides of it, the headstone is clean and pristine and way more taken care of than some of the ones beside it.
And just as her eyes glaze over how white and pretty the headstone is under the greying sky, she turns her head and there’s Basil, hands full of cleaning supplies and a conflicted emotion flickering through his eyes.
Aubrey doesn’t speak, but instead blinks and moves over slowly, patting the space in the dirt and grass and leaves next to her. Basil moves, then, and sets the cleaning supplies a little ways away from them when they sit down next to her.
It’s silent, and then “Do you visit her often?”
She just barely catches that those words left her lips. Basil looks a little startled, but they smooth themself over and look at Mari’s headstone instead. Aubrey does the same. “Ah- I mean? Sorta?” They start, fumbling for the right words. “I… I got a job here, as a headstone cleaner,”
Aubrey nods, slowly. “So, I don’t really ‘visit’ her? But I- I clean her headstone the most. So maybe that counts?”
“It’s visiting, in a way.” She hums.
Basil laughs a little. It’s sad, and she can almost see blue hyacinths in their eyes. They look so utterly dejected, and sorrowful, and they have a face full of regret that makes her scrunch up her nose and look back at Mari’s headstone again.
“I guess so,” Basil tells her. “I'm trying to get emancipated, finally. It’s… A lot of paperwork, but I’m doing it.”
“Ah,” Aubrey says. “How’s Polly?”
Basil pauses, and they lower their head a little. “She’s… Coping, I guess. I think I scared her a lot with the whole…” Their arms make a vague gesture towards themself.
“Yeah,” Aubrey murmurs. “That scared the shit out of all of us.”
“Sorry.” Basil says, a bit sad.
She sighs, despondent, and her hand finds its way to their head. They stiffen, but they don’t pull away, and Aubrey makes sure her hand is light and soft. Basil eventually relaxes a little. But they’re still stiff- and when have they not been, around her? It’s her own fault, anyways.
Aubrey shakes her head, and there’s stars coating the rim of her eyes in a glittery sheen. “I thought you two were dead. You looked the part.”
Bail doesn’t speak, but they lean against her shoulder- like before, when Mari wasn’t buried under dirt and flowers and pretty white stone, and everything was okay and good and happy. “I’m sorry.” They say again, voice weak and wavering. They’re both about to cry, and both of them know it.
Aubrey breathes, and sighs, and smiles a little. It’s soft.
“It’s not your fault,” She tells them. “It never was.”
She leaves the graveyard with red-rimmed eyes and part of her sweater covered in tears.
She can’t find it in her to care too much.
* * *
Aubrey finds Sunny dissociating on the side of the lake in the old hideout.
Sol’s been back for a little bit, staying in a hotel nearby and visiting town every once and awhile. Aubrey has hardly seen Sol, but Basil’s been looking a bit happier and she knows that at least they have seen sol a bit.
Sol’s tense in all the wrong ways, and there’s something about how suns neck is strained that makes her move to his side. She shoves herself down on the boardwalk next to sol, and doesn’t speak for a little bit.
She finds that she owes sol blood, debt, as does sol, for so long now- reuniting the friend group in such a morbid way that makes her want to kick and cry and scream at sol for hours on end. But instead, she finds herself sitting next to sol, at two in the morning, over a calm lake where sol’d almost been drowned by her of all people twice.
And then Aubrey realizes that she had pushed sol in the first time, not knowing about suns lack of an ability to swim- and that it’d been an accident . And that a freak accident wherein sol’d pushed suns own sister down the stairs and fae’d died- and sol’d been so terrified suns friend had to come up with an even more morbid way to get away from the guilt of it.
(They all know it didn’t work.)
Looking at Sunny now, she pairs sol with the word from her therapist about how forgiveness is earned, not given away- and she wonders if she’s forgiven sol yet. She wonders if she ever did, she wonders if she ever will.
Aubrey shakes her head, opens her mouth, and starts talking.
“I think I relapsed this morning,” She says, to a dissociated friend. “I got so angry and it’s like everything just- broke,” She pauses and thinks. “And I broke a vase-'' Aubrey holds up her hands, covered in colorful band aids. “-The pieces cut my hands up real bad. Had to run over to Kel’s and pick up band aids, but the only shit it had was this rainbow gunk and I had to roll with it.”
She pauses again. “It gave some vague lecture about first-aid. Infections and shit. I think it forgot to take his meds again, it was all over the fuckin’ place- you should have seen it,” Aubrey hums. “Anyways. I don’t really think I wanted to know about infections ‘nd stuff. I think I like not knowing things, now.” Ever since the hospital, anyways- is there, but not said.
“It’s like Schrodinger, or whatever. With his box, and the cat, and the particles and it all. You know about that experiment?” She gets no answer. “It’s a thought experiment. It goes like this. There’s a guy, and he puts a cat in a box, and the box has a radioactive thing and a flask of poison, and… that part’s not really important. There’s an internal monitor that detects radioactivity- and if even a single atom decays, the glass of the poison vial breaks and kills the cat. That’s the gist of it. And there’s this thing, in quantum physics- because it’s about quantums, the thought experiment- there’s this interpretation of it that implies, after a while, the cat is both alive and dead. That’s how most people know it, right?”
A beat of movement out of the corner of her eye. She thinks Sunny gave a stiff nod.
Aubrey kicks her legs out and flops backwards on the dock- she cracks her knuckles and keeps a careful eye on her friend. “But when you look in the box, the cat is either alive or dead. Not both. So the question is- when does one quantum superposition end and another occur?” She pauses. “And… I guess the point of it all is to compare quantums to cats. Because a cat can’t be both alive and dead, but a quantum particle can. Or at least, it can be two things at once- or at least, it can be until it’s observed. You know about that, Sunny? You know that some people figure quantum particles change when they’re observed?”
Sunny nods again. Aubrey shifts her gaze up to the open sky.
“I’m not really interested in the science of it,” She says, and it’s kind of a lie, because Aubrey does find science interesting, but it’s also not, because “I care more about how people interpret the whole thing. Is the cat both alive and dead? Is it ever? Does our observation of the event really change anything?” She kicks her legs out again, brings up water with each sway of them. “Some people say the cat is either one or the other, even before the box is opened. Either the atom decayed or it didn’t. Either the cat is alive or it’s dead. I think those kind of people are the worst.” She smiles to herself, kicking again. “How stupid, to give up any kind of control when the universe is just offering it out to you. To let it go and make a decision behind your back.”
She quiets down again and blinks, and then kicks her legs once, twice, and then a third time. And not long after they become beats and patterns and she’s kicking to the tune of a half-written song she and Kel are trying to get Basil to be the vocals of. Part of her shuts up because if Sunny cares even at all, then sol certainly doesn’t care when sol’s dissociated and almost entirely unresponsive.
But instead of brushing it off and ignoring her- sol’s the one that moves, stiff and disjointed. Sol flops backwards like she did maybe a minute or two ago, and kicks up water with her. Aubrey’s finally letting herself see that sol’s grown his hair out. It’s longer than Kel’s and it’s not cleaned properly, and part of her smiles in a soft kind of way as she makes a mental note to teach sol how to properly care for long hair. (And part of her, just a small part, decides that if sol decides to dye it purple like Mari wanted to when they were eight and eleven and twelve she’ll steal Kel’s mom’s credit card and buy sol some dye from that good expensive brand she used for her own hair.)
“If a tree falls somewhere in this forest, and no one is around to hear it-” Sunny starts, gaze on the sky, like hers. “Does it make a sound?”
“Well,” Aubrey says. “We’d probably hear it from here- But, ” She pauses. “No. Of course not.” She rolls her head just a little closer to her friend’s. “Perception is everything, you know?”
Sunny makes a quiet sort of humming sound.“If a man has a boat, and slowly, every piece of wood is repaired- one piece at a time, until no part of the original remains… Is that still the same boat?”
“Does the man still think it’s the same boat?”
“I think he’s the one asking the question.”
“Then it’s like the cat,” Aubrey decides. “It’s both the same boat and it isn’t, until he makes up his mind.”
“What about how other people see it?” Sunny asks. “If his wife thinks it’s the same boat- but his son thinks it’s a different one?”
“Then they’re both right, too,” Aubrey tells him. “It’s all lies and shit, anyway.”
Sunny huffs a shaky, shuddery breath. Aubrey’s grown all too familiar with that kind of breathing, so she makes a fist and lies the back of it onto suns chest, where suns heart is. Sol does the same. “I.. Don’t think. The truth is that… Flexible,” Sunny says. Sol’s quiet, and Aubrey is familiar with his quietness, and she lets sol finish. (Months ago, she would have shot back with loud, brash words. Now though, she’s quiet too.) “Some things do have right answers.”
“Who’s to say?” She argues a little- bold but not as brash and violent as before. She knocks her fist gently against suns chest, and sol does the same to hers.
“If your weird theory is right, then-” Sunny huffs. “Me.”
Aubrey laughs. Bittersweet. “How much consideration will you give other viewpoints until you’re comfortable in your own?”
It’s quiet.
And then, “I don’t know.”
“That seems to be our answer to most things now, huh?” It’s not a question.
“Yeah.”
They lie underneath the twinkling stars until they fade and the sun peeks through the trees, and then she’s carrying a half-asleep Sunny back to where he’s staying over for bits and pieces of summer break.
* * *
When Aubrey feels like bashing things in with her baseball bat again, she slams her feet against the pedals of her new bike and rides to a nearby music store.
It’s quaint and peaceful, the smell of roses in the air, and she takes her time walking through a section of the place that has it’s walls lined with electric guitars. There’s a row of amps on a table closer to the ground, too, and she takes her time dragging her fingers carefully over the strings of some of the hanging guitars.
There’s one in particular she really likes, the sides of it stained blue and pink and purple as hyacinths and lavender and poppies bleed into each other. Sincerity and elegance and compassion, Basil’s voice wavers a little in the back of her head- and she finds herself having taken the guitar off the shelf.
Gingerly, her fingers wrap around the neck and the base- and she jumps a little when there’s footsteps behind her. A kind woman is there, billowy umber hair fading into a bright, bright green. The nametag clipped onto the grey hoodie (the zipper isn’t up, and there’s a black shirt underneath that has a piece of art she vaguely recognizes and the words BURN PYGMALION!! ! imprinted on them) reads Cody Andrews, They/Them- and Aubrey can’t do anything to stop the burning of her ears and the heat that climbs up her neck.
“Do you wanna try that one out?” Cody asks, a smile on her face. And Aubrey almost chokes after a moment when she realizes that they were talking to her- and fuck, she still needed to actually respond.
“Er- yeah. Yeah- That’d- That’d be nice, actually.” She replies after a moment, willing the heat to stop grappling up her neck like ivy.
Cody walks her over to a part of the shop with padded walls, music stands, and a couple of chairs. They bring an amp around to her next and plug the guitar up to it for her. There’s a beat of silence before Aubrey moves her fingers against the strings a little more deliberately than before, when it was up on the wall, and it sounds a little flat because her fingers are pressed down a bit too soft- but it’s smooth and cool and she loves it anyway.
“Hey, uh-” Aubrey pulls her lips into a line, and looks over at Cody, who’s been watching from a nearby chair. “How much would a couple of, uh, things- to like, get everything with this set up, be?”
They giggle a little at her fumbling, but Cody gets the point- and they pull out their phone and tap a few things on it. “So, for a case, picks, cords, the guitar itself, and an amp- it’d be around three-hundred twenty five. A bit cheap, but that guitar you’ve got there is old,” Cody pauses. “We can add a guitar stand to that- and a good one’ll chalk that up to another twenty bucks.”
Aubrey grimaces, and Cody notices. “I can always hold the stuff for you, if you like.”
She smiles in response, and misses it when Cody’s own ears gain a red flush. “That’d be great.” She says, mirth as thick as fog in her eyes. They grin back.
“No problem,” Cody leads her up to the counter, and sorts everything to be bought at a later date carefully to the side- for a reason Aubrey doesn’t entirely know, but she’s grateful for it nonetheless.
“Hey pinky,” They call, just as she’s about to turn and leave. “Wanna go get coffee sometime?”
Aubrey feels a blush spread across her cheeks- and her throat is tight with elation and she has to swallow when she nods, and make sure, very carefully, that it’s not too eager. “Yeah- Yeah I’d- Really, like to.”
Cody grins, a pretty pink on their face, and pushes a card into her hands with their phone number. “I’ll keep you updated.” They say, before their lips meet her cheek and she’s left walking out of the shop with a warm, warm face and her fingers brushing across the side of it.
She doesn’t hear the end of it from Kel, that night, but she doesn’t particularly mind.
* * *
Aubrey rolls up her sleeves, and takes twenty dollars to the grocery store to pay for cleaning supplies.
It’s the little bit out of the account that she’s using to save up for the guitar and everything, but she doesn’t buy them on a whim and instead brings them into the house with furrowed eyebrows and a bit of disgust on her face.
She purposefully shoves her foot on top of a nearby cockroach, and then gets to work.
Aubrey shovels bottles and cans of whiskey and gross, watered-down beer into trash bags and stomps pizza boxes flat with the soles of her shoes. She shakes take-out boxes and trays upside down, and then does the same to the bags they were in, narrowing down any roosting vermin and then shoving them in the bags with everything else.
There’s one, two, then three bags lining the inside of the house- before she drags them out front into the yard and leaves them there to be carried to the dumpster later.
In two hours she gets past the outer layers of glass and aluminum and cardboard and the ickier part of the floors makes itself known- in food residue and debris that clogs in between the tiles and floorboards and leaves nasty splotches and stains all across the floor.
She sucks in a breath through her teeth, and then gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs- and after maybe thirty minutes, she peels things off and the stains are a little less prominent, and her arm feels heavy and it burns a bit, but she feels a little bit better.
Aubrey clears out the hallway with tedious effort, and by the time she’s at the rear of it her supplies are running a bit thin and she hauls herself over to the kitchen where she knows there’s old ones left stale under the sink for years now. She plucks them from baskets and trudges back to where her mom’s old bedroom is.
And even though the woman who’d piled herself in a lump on the couch and just barely made it to work on time throughout the years was almost never around, anymore, she stumbles over trash that encircles the door in an almost deliberate barricade that she’s not even sure was as deliberate as it seems.
She takes out more and more bags, and they’re spilling over one another at this point- so she grabs them by the ties and starts piling them into the dumpster down the road. She goes back and forth a few times, and sweat lines her brow, but she keeps going until they’re all in the dump and she can trek back to her house to keep cleaning and cleaning.
Her fingers pull out old junk mail and moldering newspapers with the covers gone faded and abstract from age- an art, in a way, and she briefly considers if she could still make paper mache out of this even though she doesn’t, and shoves them all into a trash bag anyway. Aubrey stomps at the roaches underfoot and then diverts her worn sneakers to more pizza boxes and foil cans.
They all get shoved into another bag, and that one’s taken outside too- and she heads back inside, steels herself, and clamps her fingers around the knob of the bedroom door. She gathers herself, and pulls it open- and the knob pops with the flat sound of gunshots she’s heard in games Sunny’s played before.
She goes in expecting this room to be the worst yet- but she’s met with the smell of unwashed laundry and wafting alcohol, and she almost feels sick for a moment. Her gut churns and she plucks out dirty clothes and throws them in the hamper, even knowing that her mother was never going to come back for them and that she’d left Aubrey here to rot besides the checks in the mail that help her barely scrape by on rent.
Aubrey bags more bottles of alcohol and cans of sodas and beer- and she swallows down the lump in her throat when she finds old pictures of a better, happier time- when her mother and father still loved each other and there was still life in her mom’s eyes. When there wasn’t a human-shaped lump on the couch day in and day out except on the off chances she put herself together enough to go to work.
The sheets of the rumpled bed feel like dead skin, and the texture of it makes her fingers burn- so instead of making it, she pulls them off and shoves them in the bags with everything else.
She spends the next ten minutes hauling everything to the dumpster again, and barely realizes she’d missed lunch- but she shrugs herself through the hunger pangs and tells herself not yet, not until the house isn’t making her skin feel like it’s coated in grease.
The bathroom is last, full of old comics and junk that she doesn’t spare a glance to and they end up inside the trash bags as well. She takes bleach and tile cleaner to the floor and counter- and she never completely chips away at the grey-green splotches that litter each surface. But that’s okay for now, she concludes, and takes the last of the trash out before she trudges back to her house.
She’s exhausted, but she finds it in her to drag herself back into the bathroom and let scalding shower water pour down her back- one of the few, hot showers she’s taken in a long while -and then she’s wrapped up in her blanket upstairs.
Aubrey knows there’s still a lot to do before the house is clean of grime and filth. Maybe, when she gets enough money, she’ll get someone else to do that for her- because her arms are sore and her body’s on fire.
But her body doesn’t feel slimy, or dirty, or gross- and maybe that’s because of the shower -but the feel of the house’s grime has lessened too, and she finds herself smiling up at the bare ceiling until she falls asleep.